Omnichannel marketing campaigns that integrate both online and offline channels ensure that your messaging reaches your customers on their preferred channel, which maximizes your brand awareness and visibility. Cohesive messaging across channels helps establish a clear brand identity in customers’ minds, which has been shown to drive more conversions.
In addition to improved brand awareness and identity, online/offline channel integration also helps with:
- Better customer targeting. Today's customers have more shopping choices than ever which is why it’s important to connect with your customers in the channels that they prefer and frequent. And if you online and offline channels are integrated, you can perform customer segmentation to target your customers with specific messaging on the channel they like best, and either direct them to other channels to continue their journey or towards a purchase option.
- Improved customer engagement. Better customer targeting also helps drive customer engagement. Why? Because getting customers fully and interactively involved in their preferred channels helps to build a positive customer experience. Higher engagement leads to more sales and ultimately higher profits.
- Positive customer journey. Integrated omnichannel campaigns are all about creating a satisfying consumer experience. Targeted messages in preferred channels should reflect and build upon the any engagements customers have already made with your brand. In this way, you create a truly customer-centric experience that demonstrates a meaningful connection with consumers.
The benefits are clear, so how do you optimize your online/offline channel integration efforts to ensure you reap the rewards and reach your marketing goals? Here's a look at three ways you can improve online/offline channel integration process.
1. Leverage data analytics to better understand customer activity
Clean, organized, unified customer data is the key to integrating digital and direct mail marketing initiatives. By analyzing real-time and historical data on customer behaviors such as email or direct mail engagement, visits to a company page, or social media use, you can gain knowledge of the content that appeals most to your customers as well as their preferred channel(s) for receiving it.
Marketers need unified visibility into the success of online and offline campaigns. This can sometimes be a challenge as different attribution models are often used to evaluate digital and traditional tactics. That’s why leveraging unified marketing measurements of campaigns is crucial to success. Seeing this data side-by-side provides the insights needed to enable optimized campaigns that better engage customers.
2. Think holistically about the customer journey
All of your channels -- both online and offline -- should be considered as arrows in your quiver: alone they may each be successful but they’re more powerful working together. Use that data we talked about in #1 and review your customer demographics and behavior to analyze how each marketing channel influences the buyer journey. Map out possible channel journeys for customers, so that you know how to optimize each one. The goal is to cross-promote your channels but let your customers go on the channel journey they want.
3. Break down data silos
Your organization has likely invested in a variety of marketing technology tools that each collect a substantial volume of customer data, which when not consolidated into one system create data silos. Data silos prevent you from collating the information required to integrate your online and offline channels, and make it impossible to achieve a unified view of the customer. The simplest and most effective way to eliminate data silos and create unified customer records is to add a customer data platform (CDP) to your MarTech stack.
CDPs integrate with your existing MarTech tools to combine all of your disparate customer data into a single database, where it is then cleansed and combined into golden customer records. With all their data in one place, marketers can then analyze it and uncover historical and real-time insights into customer behavior that can be used to better understand customer journeys and preferences. A CDP helps marketers maximize the effectiveness of their omnichannel campaigns, ensuring that all marketing resources and channels are being used to their maximum potential and that customers are getting a fully integrated experience.
Don't let technology be the barrier to your online/offline channel integration
Studies show that 87% of shoppers want a consistent, integrated online/offline experience from the brands they shop, and 66% will shop a brand if its inventory is available across all of its channels. But a study from Periscope by McKinsey found that 78% of U.S. retailers say they don’t have a unified shopping experience -- primarily because they lack analytics for all their channels.
Don’t be part of that group. Customer data analysis is a necessity for successful, integrated, omnichannel marketing, but we know that it can be challenging given the amount of data and number of systems marketers typically use. So if you don’t already have one, adding a CDP to your MarTech stack -- such as the QuickPivot Customer Data Platform -- will allow you to store your online and offline customer data in one location, combine that data into golden records, and then analyze that data to better understand the performance of your marketing channels and identify opportunities to improve customer targeting and content personalization.
Here at QuickPivot, we believe that managing and analyzing customer data doesn't have to be difficult, which is why we designed our CDP to make those tasks intuitive and easily accomplished. Contact us today and we can show you how a CDP can be the power behind your integrated offline and online marketing efforts.
